


Green Cat, Black Cat

by ambiguously



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Coming of Age, F/M, Fluff, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-12
Updated: 2017-03-12
Packaged: 2018-10-03 09:54:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10241996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambiguously/pseuds/ambiguously
Summary: Pidge goes home.





	

The war ends a month after Pidge turns eighteen, one day after she throws herself into her father's arms and hugs him until neither can breathe. Matt helps her usher the rest of the poor prisoners out of the rat hole where they've spent the last few years, and he takes his own turn squeezing Dad until ribs creak. The celebration lasts another three days, and maybe longer, but Dad wants to get back to Earth. Pidge can't imagine saying no.

Her friends understand. She's surrounded by hugs and well-wishes. Lance decides he wants to get back to Earth, too. Hunk's going to stay here. Keith says he's got nothing to go back to.

Pidge spends a long, long time resting her back against Green, feeling the curious flow between her mind and the robotic lion's spirit. It's the hardest goodbye, the one making her rethink all the rest. She'll miss the team, of course, but as she walks away from the hangar for the last time, she can feel a part of her own soul torn out like a page from a book, left on the floor in the lion's shadow.

"You've grown so much," Dad says, reading the look on her face. He strokes her head. "I like the haircut. It suits you."

Self-consciously, she rubs her neck. "Thanks."

* * *

Mom can't stop crying, can't stop kissing and scolding and hugging them all. Her own walls are covered with the same clippings Pidge collected over the months after Matt and Dad disappeared, as well as the few news articles that made it home about Voltron.

"You brought them home," Mom says, half a dozen times, kissing her cheeks, and running her fingers to where Pidge's hair ends. "I am so proud of you."

She also says, hundreds of hugs later, that she should never have let Katie watch "Mulan" so often when she was little. Pidge thinks she should have watched a lot of other movies to get a better idea of how to make her deception work. She'd almost been caught out at the Garrison more than once. Stupid showers.

Mom kept the house. Pidge still has her room the way she left it. The closet is full of dresses that don't fit. She picks out new jeans and hoodies and comfortable things. The dresses don't fit her any longer, no matter what the size.

* * *

Dad is living off a pension from the Garrison, not a retirement and not a disability benefit, but enough to pay the bills so Mom can cut her own hours at work and spend time with her family, 

It's great, and it's strange. This planet is so small. Pidge regularly goes outside at night and stares at stars that don't move except to wheel around in the same patterns over and over. Lance calls to check on her now and then. Hunk calls when he makes the trip home to see his own family. For a few minutes, she's herself again, laughing with her friends over jokes not even Matt gets.

Everyone at home calls her Katie. Just like the dresses, it doesn't really fit.

* * *

She and Matt apply to the same college. Matt is welcome to rejoin, he's been told, but Katherine Holt is banned for life, no matter how much of a hero Pidge was. Civilian life promises less trouble, right up until New Students Day. As soon as Matt's name gets spoken, he's crowded around by students and parents curious about Kerberos.

No one crowds around Pidge. Katie Holt is a nobody, and Pidge Gunderson is half-myth.

She accepts admission to a different university, two hours from Matt's school. "Call me Cat," she says to her roommate.

* * *

She grows into Cat like she grows into her new hoodies. Cat Holt flies through her engineering classes like Pidge flew through space in her ship. Earth technology seems so limited now that she's wallowed in the guts of Altean circuitry. Her only marks that aren't perfect come from when she forgets she can't just reach for a reflurbitator or juice up the system with some beckin.

University is a little like living in the Garrison, and a lot like nothing else. The other girls who share her classes tend to dress like she does. Pidge was worried she'd feel like an outsider, but Cat looks like everyone else here.

She doesn't have a lot of time for dating. She tries anyway. Cat dates a boy for three weeks, and she dates a girl for six months. The day she finds herself kissing Lauren while thinking about Allura, she breaks it off. She has work to focus on, and a past not to relive. She graduates in three years, and dives right back in to go for her Master's in Aerospace a year later.

The day she graduates, she gets word via Lance that Shiro has reappeared from his long, mysterious absence.

* * *

Katherine Holt would never be allowed to return to Galaxy Garrison as a member of the military. As a civilian contractor, Cat Holt negotiates three times the salary and walks through the door in charge of her own team. They want to build a Voltron to protect Earth.

In the back of her heart, Green purrs. She can't in good faith or bad recreate the magic which underwove the technology. This Voltron will not be a union of five lions. On her first day, she signs the many, many confidentiality forms. Then she shows the team her idea for fifteen interlocking vehicles.

* * *

Experts come and go. Hunk does a long turn on assignment with her team, and it's like old times. She doesn't have to stop and explain things to him, or translate in her head from the Altean concept to something equivalent on Earth. The project jumps forward, and slows again the day he's transferred.

"You ought to think about going back to Arus for a while," he tells her as they have a goodbye feast at their favorite diner. "Everyone misses you."

"Maybe I'll fly my Voltron out to meet yours."

They chat about everyone. Matt has started to date the boy Cat dated back in school, which is weird on a lot of levels she's not sure she can handle. Did Braden only date Cat because she looked like Matt, or is he only dating Matt because he reminds him of Cat? The questions spill out.

Hunk says, "Is Matt happy?"

"Yeah."

"Then it doesn't matter."

* * *

A year into the project, and they're ready for the first tests. She's got a few pilots lined up to try after she's performed the maiden voyage herself.

The Garrison assigns a new pilot to her team and insists they take the first experimental flight. Cat stomps her way to the Sky Marshall's office to complain, pushing past his receptionist, forcing the flustered young man to buzz her in as she flings open the door and nearly knocks down the pilot.

Sky Marshall Lee turns to her with a frown. "Ms. Holt. I believe you already know our test pilot, Takashi."

There's a twitch on Shiro's face that smooths away again as he smiles.

"Shiro!" Remembering herself just in time, she throws out a hand and shakes. He's even better with the prosthetic than he used to be.

With half a glance, no words needed, Shiro tilts a head at Sky Marshall Lee. Does he know? With a wordless nod of her own, she tells him, yes, he knows. "It's good to see you, Pidge. It's been a long time."

* * *

The rest of the team calls him by his first name, even though it makes him twitch. They call her Ms. Holt or Cat. At dinner, alone, or just working together on the last tweaks of the first ship, she's Pidge again and he will always be Shiro. He's not Hunk, and doesn't have the same brain, but he's got a pilot's instinct for coaxing out the last bit of power and maneuverability from an engine.

"Fast and strong," they remind each other.

The morning of the test, they've already transported the ship to the site. Shiro flies it through paces Pidge knows will pass. Her heart skips a beat when he readies for transwarp. The ship bursts out of sight in blue radiation. Shiro's gone. If her calculations are off, if his gut is wrong, she's just killed him or stranded him on the other side of the universe again.

She counts the seconds against her own palm, tapping out the beats of her pulse. One tick. Two ticks. Three ticks.

He reappears in a blaze of red.

"System test successful," Shiro says, which echoes over the loudspeaker. Even as she's surrounded by cheers, she's sketching more ideas for the other vehicles.

She's already planned that some will be best suited for air, and some for terrain, and some water-based, to allow for exploration of three biomes. Because they must explore. Pidge and Shiro have been in Lee's office time and again pushing for the expansion of the space exploration wing of the Garrison's charter. Now that they have proven the concept, they can scale up to fit huge ships to carry the small fleet. They could go anywhere.

"We'll see," Lee says, but he does find them more funding.

* * *

The debriefing and the repair work take them into the night. Cat's high on adrenaline and victory. Her Voltron is going to fly. Shiro's wearing a satisfied smile that says a lot. He doesn't do excited, but pleased looks good on him.

They grab dinner at the late-night diner, the only place that does a full breakfast at two AM with unlimited refills on her coffee. Cat loves it here, loves her work, loves this part of her life, even if Green is far away still growling at her in her dreams. She's buzzing, and that's probably why she kisses Shiro as he sits at an angle to her at their favorite table.

For one tick, he's kissing her back, before his eyes get big and he leans away. "Uh, Pidge?"

Her own eyes are the size of saucers. "Sorry! Sorry." There's a blush covering her entire body. Dinner's done. She shoots to her feet. If she throws cash at the waitress as she's running out the door, she might make it to the parking lot before she dies of embarrassment. 

Shiro's hand is on her arm, his flesh hand. She thinks, later, that if he went to stop her with his Galra hand, she might never have spoken to him again. "Hey, it's fine. Sit down. Please?"

That blush isn't going anywhere. She doesn't want to sit. But this is Shiro, and he's been her friend for almost ten years. She sits.

"I'm so sorry," she says. "I was just excited about the whole day, and I shouldn't have, and I really hope you can forgive me because that was completely out of line." She's babbling. Thank whatever lucky stars haven't abandoned her that the diner is otherwise empty.

"You just surprised me. I should apologize. I haven't kissed anyone in a long time, and I forgot how normal people react."

He watches her, with that half-smile he gets, not at all upset with her. He's worried he's upset her instead. _Normal people_ , he said, like he no longer considers himself normal. She doesn't know when she left normal behind, but she figures it's been a long, long time.

His hand is still touching her arm. He leans in a little closer, giving her time to scoot away. Cat doesn't scoot away. Pidge never would. Katie is long gone. Shiro's mouth touches hers, and it's not the same kind of happy peck she gave him. It's gentler, more thoughtful, the kind of kiss you linger on, wondering if you're making a mistake or if you're finally fixing a lot of old mistakes all at once.

She likes it.

* * *

The fifteenth vehicle launches three years after her project started. Matt is given an offer to pilot it, and he accepts. Pidge isn't going to fly her giant robot, not as a member of the team. She and Shiro can take out the modules for tests, can run through the joining process as they train up their new teams within a team. As she rests beside him at night, she can feel Green inside her mind, beckoning her home, and she wakes to see the distant look on Shiro's face as Black calls to him. As the first light of morning throws a pink blush against the window blinds, they make love, feeling the call of the lions pulling them together, pulling them out towards the stars.

Their work here finishes on a bright afternoon full of dull speeches. Hunk and Lance are in the bleachers, cheering loudly at the wrong times. The rest of their team is back on Arus, waiting.

Pidge hugs Matt goodbye at the end. She's already hugged Mom and Dad.

As soon as the explorer vessel launches on its mission, she joins her team aboard Lance's ship. Shiro's hand is on her waist as they watch the Earth fall away beneath them.

"You ready?" he asks her, so quiet that only the two of them can hear.

Pidge rests against him. "Let's go home."

* * *

end


End file.
